The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror (18 page)

I tugged at my own harness. It wouldn’t open either. “That
is
strange,” I said. “I can’t seem to—”

All of a sudden, the rocket took off again. Green flew face first into the wall between me and the General.

Crunch.

“Stop the rocket!” I shouted. “He’s hurt!” I struggled to lift an arm to help my friend, but the acceleration flung my hand back against the wall.

The General swore. “I forgot about the staging area!”

“What staging area?”

“It’s a two-hop jump to the airport.”

“But we’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

“Gotta get him to the airport first. Hold on!”

We landed a second time. Green was flung back against the opposite wall—
crunch!
—and slumped to the floor. I ripped off my harness—this time it opened—and went to him.

“Don’t touch me!” he cried out. Broken bones protruded all over his body.

“Where does it hurt?” I asked him.

The hatchway opened. A TSA Official Drone stood there.

“Get this man a medic,” the General ordered.

The Official Drone scratched his ample belly and adjusted his plastic badge. “Don’t report to no military types,” he said. “We’s privatizized. Outsourced contractors, you know.”

“My friend is going to die!” I pleaded. “For the love of the Prophet!”

The Official Drone clucked his tongue. “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t want to get in no trouble or nothing.”

I stuck my head out the hatchway. We were in some kind of subway station. A group of airmen were playing cards nearby. Gambling for what looked like, but obviously could not be, Ritz crackers.

“Need a medic!” I shouted. “Got a man down here!”

“Hey!” The Official Drone blocked my path. “Authorized Personnel Only.”

I pushed past him onto the platform. Two of the airmen saw me and jumped up. They wore medics’ white uniforms. They wiped their lips, grabbed their first aid kits and a stretcher, and jogged toward us.

“What happened?” one asked.

“The locking mechanism must have failed,” the General said. “Never seen that happen before. Crazy, huh?”

They ducked under the hatchway and knelt over Green. “Got to get him out of here,” the second medic said. They carried him outside and laid him down on the stretcher. He screamed in pain.

“Look on the bright side, Harry,” I said.

He groaned and coughed up blood. “What’s that?”

I brushed the hair out of his eyes. “In the hospital you’ll have plenty of time to strengthen your faith.” The Amendment was strictly enforced in hospitals. Only diabetics with security ratings like Coroner Juicy got glucose IVs.

“On three,” the first medic said, and they lifted the stretcher. Green clawed at my pant leg.

“Wait!” I said.

“No time,” said a medic.

“Thirty seconds,” Green insisted.

They put him back down on the ground. I knelt at his side. “What is it, partner?”

“Frolick,” he said. “My friend. Do something for me.”

“Anything.”

“Remember what we talked about this morning? In the car?”

“I remember.” His daughter’s mysterious illness.

“Go to that doctor I mentioned,” he said. “He’s got some special medicine for my kid.”

The quack-quack naturopath. Oh boy. Probably a thinly disguised food dealer. Good way to lose my measuring tape. “Can’t your wife go?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.

“Eat it,” Green swore. “Are you my friend or aren’t you?”

“Sure, Harry,” I said. I patted the bones sticking out of his hand. “No problem. You can count on me.”

“I can?” Delirium overtook him.

“Sure you can. You’re my friend. I promise. You hear me? I promise, OK?”

Green’s eyes rolled up in his head. His chest arched. One of the medics touched a finger to his neck.

“He’s not breathing. Cardiac event.” He took out a pair of paddles. “Clear!”

They put the paddles to his chest. The shock lifted him from the stretcher and laid him flat again.

The General appeared at my side. He put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Is he going to die?”

“He’ll be fine,” the medic said. “But we need to get him to the hospital.”

The two medics picked up the stretcher and entered a nearby elevator. Then they were gone.

Just like that. No more Green. I was on my own. For the first time ever. My partner had always been there for me—cynical, wisecracking old Harry. It could be months before he was back on the beat again. If he lived.

But right now I had a job to do. A job that was more important than either Green or myself. I had to save the world from the menace of food terrism, and bring the Prophet’s Message of Hope and Air to all you ignorant ferrners. Only then could we be truly free.

The General handed me a laxative assault rifle. I chambered a dart and flicked off the safety.

“Where to?” I asked.

The General drew his commemorative laxative pistol. His balloons towered overhead, the breathtaking symbol of command. “The tower. This way!”

“Hey!” the TSA Official Drone shouted after us. “You’re not supposed to have guns in here! That’s it. I’m reporting you! You hear me? My supervisor’s going to hear about this!”

Without breaking stride, the General fired a laxative dart into the Drone’s thigh. The man collapsed on the subway platform, going poo-poo in his pants.

“You’ll get in trouble for that,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But it was so worth it.”

We climbed a set of stairs and entered the main terminal. The airport was deserted. Dust and ash covered everything. I stifled a sneeze. The cold afternoon sun flooded through the windows. We passed burned-out restaurants and duty-free stores, and the remains of a Muffin Man cart. Wiped that smirk off your face, didn’t we, Muffin Man?

“Here we are,” the General announced, stopping before a heavy metal security door.

“But where’s the assault team?” I asked. “Aren’t they going to meet us here?”

“What assault team?”

“I just assumed…”

“It’s only one guy,” the General scoffed. “We can take him. See?” He took out a cell phone and pressed a button.

I jumped back in horror. The screen showed a toilet cam’s view of a man’s bottom. Loop after loop of a continuous poo garlanded the camera lens.

“Where is it all coming from?”

“Depends on what he’s putting in the other end, I suppose.”

The General pushed open the door. We climbed a spiral staircase. The smell was different than in the terminal. Here it smelled like poo. At the top of the stairs we halted at a door marked “Control Room.”

I turned the handle and pushed. It gave an inch, and sprang back. Some sort of foam padding was blocking the door.

“Help me push.”

The General leaned his bulk against the door, but again no luck. A strange moaning noise came from inside the control room. A glass fire cabinet hung on the wall next to the door. I pointed.

“The axe.”

The General opened the cabinet and hefted the axe. I pushed the door open a crack, and he swung the blade at the hinges. Once, twice, and the door snapped off. By pushing it sideways we managed to wiggle it free of the frame. What we saw made us gasp.

The doorway was filled with hairy white skin. The moaning noise was louder now.

“Does this mean what I think it means?” I asked.

“Let’s get down onto the tarmac. See what we can see from there.”

We made our way down the stairs and out a side door. We craned our necks up at the tower. White flesh bulged against the inside of every pane. The sound of whirring machinery came from the other side of the tower. We crept through the shadows to get a better look.

A luggage conveyor belt had been set up that ran from the tarmac to a single open window far above our heads. At the bottom, two men in fluorescent jackets were unloading crates from the back of a refrigerated truck and chucking their contents onto the conveyor belt.

“O Mine Prophet,” I said.

Millions of dollars of food mounted its way to the window above: platters of glistening sausages, buckets of barbecue chicken wings, bowls of curly fries, doughnuts piled high in a rainbow of colorful frosting, a wheel of cheddar cheese cut into chunks, vats of unwrapped candies and caramels, a pyramid of hamburgers—more food than I had seen in years. My Twinkie squealed with delight. The food squealed back.

“
Eat me, eat me!”
cried the doughnuts.

“
Put me in your mouth and chew me!”
shouted the sausages.

“
Just a little lick, big boy,”
the curly fries purred in that throaty way of theirs.
“Down there. The way you know I like it. Um-hmm. One kiss on my salty spot, and you’ll love me forever.”

“Shut up,” I said through gritted teeth.

The General looked at me sideways. “I didn’t say anything.”

Then my Twinkie spotted them. Brethren. A crate of shucked Twinkies landed on the conveyor belt. I had to prevent this unlooked-for species reunion.

“Don’t move!” I shouted. “You’re under arrest!”

The two men took one look at my ATFF trench coat and the General’s uniform and rank balloons and took off running. The backs of their jackets read, “Food Mafia Waiter.” The General opened fire. I followed his lead.

One of the waiters fell. The other was soon out of range. He slipped through a hole in the fence and disappeared.

We approached the fallen waiter. A laxative syringe protruded from his buttock. But before I could question the man, the General shouted, “Mothereating food terrist!” and pumped two rounds point blank into the man’s skull, killing him.

“What did you do that for?” I wailed.

The General kicked the body. “It’s scum like him who make our streets unsafe for women and children.”

“But we could have questioned him!”

The General hung his head. “I’m sorry. I got so worked up, seeing all those addictive caloric substances, I guess I lost control.”

I sighed and patted his shoulder. “I know how hard it is,” I said. “But you gotta stop killing suspects like that.”

The General wiped away a tear. “I’m just a simple soldier,” he said. “A humble warrior of air. Trained to kill in defense of our freedoms. You understand?”

I gave him a hug. My arms didn’t reach all the way around. He crushed me against his ribbons. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “But no more shoot to kill. Got it?”

He nodded in contrition. “Got it.”

We returned to the conveyor belt. It stopped and started at irregular intervals. The box of Twinkies was halfway to the top.

“Cover me,” I said.

I climbed up until I was hidden behind the box of bewingèd pastries. When they heard my ankle Twinkie’s song of joy, they danced and began their suicidal rapist death chorus. I recognized the tune. I knew the signs. They were about to attack. Not here. Not now! I looked over my shoulder.

The General was rooting around inside the back of the truck, his jaws moving up and down. Eating air, no doubt. A Twinkie wing brushed my lips, and I resigned myself to their kamikaze assault. A dozen had already raped my throat, filling my mouth with their sweet, creamy guts, when my cell phone rang.

I ducked down and fumbled to open it. “Hello?” I said, my mouth still full.

“Jason? Is that you?” my wife’s voice asked. “Are you
eating
something?”

I swallowed. “Chantal. Oxy. I can explain.”

“You think I’m stupid? You think you married a moron?”

A bucket of chicken wings fell empty to the ground. The conveyor belt advanced. Only two boxes separated me from the open window. I cradled the phone against my shoulder and held my laxative assault rifle at ready.

“I can’t talk right now,” I said. “I’m a little busy.”

Her voice took on a throaty purr. Kind of like the curly fries. “It’s been a busy day for me as well. Want to know what I’ve been up to?”

The box of candies tumbled below. The conveyor belt advanced again.

“I’m on a secret mission for the Prophet,” I hissed. “Can we have this conversation later?”

“Fuck the Prophet,” she said. “We need to talk about this now.”

“Oxy!” I exclaimed, horrified at this outburst. “We’ll talk about your use of language, too. Although I might not be home until tomorrow morning.”

“You come home now,” she screamed in my ear. “Or tomorrow morning I won’t be here, and neither will your son. Is that clear?”

The conveyor belt advanced again. The Twinkies were next. “I’ll see what I can do,” I whispered, and slapped the cell phone shut.

I peered through the slats of the Twinkie crate. A sound like a vacuum cleaner came from up ahead. The conveyor belt advanced one final time. The Twinkies’ choral overture to rape and death swelled in an ode to joy, then disappeared. A grey hose sucked them up. The crate fell away. I lifted my rifle and stared at the most disgusting sight I have ever seen.

Thirteen

An elephant stared back at me. Or was it a woolly mammoth? A metal snout protruded from its face. Shaggy hair grew down over its eyes. But the truth was far worse. How could it be? It was a man. His body filled the entire control room.

“ATFF!” I shouted. “Drop the snout!”

Faster than I could react, the snout sucked the rifle from my grip.

“Hey! Give that back!”

The snout swung side to side.

“Does that mean no?”

The snout nodded.

Strong with the power of Twinkie corpses rotting in my stomach, I stood, grabbed the snout and pulled. With a snapping noise it came away in my hands. I pulled the rifle out, all covered in goo, and threw the snout over the side of the conveyor belt.

A man’s face appeared at the window. Or rather, a set of eyes, a nose and a mouth floating in a sea of fat.

“What are you staring at?” the blob demanded.

Sympathy crashed over me like ranch dressing over an addictive caloric Caesar salad. “You poor thing,” I breathed. “How did you get so fat?”

“Who you calling fat, twiggy?”

“Twiggy!” I was aghast at this unlooked-for compliment. “Are you calling me skinny? Look at this!” I pinched a wad of fat through my trench coat. “And this! And this! What do you call that?”